Thus far, we've discussed unlocking unprecedented levels of generosity at a high level. We've walked through how important it is to understand how the next generation thinks about giving. We've discussed alternative assets with a deep dive in cryptocurrency and stock donations, giving detailed playbooks and insights about how to execute that well.

Now, it's time to go to the next level. In this chapter, I will give you seven master-level tactics that I believe can really change the game in terms of maximizing giving overall.

Here are the seven tactics:

• Save on credit, debit and ACH merchant processing fees.
  • This will cover anything connected to online giving as it relates to a checking, savings account, or credit card. There are a lot of opportunities to save on credit fees, and I will give you a deep dive on the background on this and how to think about it.
• Teach the tithe.
  • Though the tithe is a church-specific principle, we can take some core principles of it from the nonprofit space as well.
• Identify high-capacity potential givers who are not yet giving.
  • A lot of times you'll experience the 80/20 rule, where 20% of your supporters are doing 80% of meeting the budget and doing the heavy lifting in terms of giving, but you have so many more potential givers. Perform an analysis on who might be added to your pool of donors.
• Take advantage of corporate matching benefits.
  • This is a low-effort, high-impact opportunity. I will break down the concrete stats about how much corporate matching goes unmatched in the United States.
• Explain IRA required minimum distributions.
  • People who have retired are actually required to take certain levels of distributions that go underused because they don't want to get taxed on them. This can be another source of donations.
• Take advantage of wills, trusts, and legacy giving.
  • This can be really important for your organization. I will give you the IRS stats on how much money is given through bequests.
• Create a line of sponsorship revenue at events.
  • I will tell you how you can create a line of revenue by taking advantage of sponsorships at conferences and events that your organization puts on.

Save on credit, debit and ACH merchant processing fees.

This first point contains vital information to make sure that your organization does not lose key donor revenue to the various fees charged by financial institutions. First, let’s understand the presence of fees is not the problem. Let me explain.

Teach the Tithe

Specifically for churches, the biggest way to move the needle in your giving is to focus on the tithe.

Something that we do every year at VIVE Church is that we dedicate the month of October to teaching biblically about the tithe. A lot of myths surround the tithe, such as the idea that the tithe is a tax to be able to go to church, or that it's just a way to get money from the people of the church. Others say that the tithe is law, while we're meant to be based on grace, or that the tithe is Old Testament while we're meant to be based in the New Testament. Ultimately, these are all excuses and diversions from what the principle of the tithe actually represents.

The principle of the tithe is not a tax; it's not even a requirement of Christian living. In the New Testament we are based on the premise of grace, not law. In saying that, the introduction of the tithe, biblically, was prelaw, before the ten commandments, even before Moses. The introduction of the tithe came from Abraham.

Abraham was a man who had gone into battle and won a victory. Because he won the victory, he acknowledged that the source of his victory was God. The bible says that Abraham then gave a tithe of the spoils he had won in that battle back to the high priest, who at the time was a representation of your relationship with God. It was, simply, a recognition that, “I wouldn't have gotten the victory without God. It is because of God that I have victory.”

This is an important truth to understand. At the end of the day, somebody will tithe consistently, on a recurring basis, sustainably, as a part of their lifestyle and the fabric of their identity once they have the revelation that everything is not their own. That all of their provision, all of their income, the reason they're living, is because of God. With that understanding, people can see that the tithe is not even giving; it's returning back a portion of what God has given them. The tithe, specifically, is taught to go to the storehouse, the place where you get spiritually fed. Today, that is the local church. The New Testament says, “Where your treasure is, is where your heart is also” (Matthew 6:21). What a very interesting understanding of what money does to us on a psychological level.

In the research for the science of generosity, which I previously discussed in Chapter 2, it was found that when you give financially, it releases a dopamine in your brain on the level of when you get to shelter or when you eat food. So even our bodies, our physiological makeup, are aligned to the fact that wherever you align your finances, you also align your heart and your spirit.

This is the base spiritual component. On a more pragmatic level, this is what moves the needle the most. You can do so many galas, put on the fanciest events, but if you don't have a core set of people and if you're not growing that set of people to understand the tithe, then you are actually not doing the most impactful thing for your organization.

There is a Silicon Valley term for this. Now, not to make this crass, because the church and nonprofit organizations are not businesses, but they are corporate entities. And how we refer to this in Silicon Valley terms is annual recurring revenue, or subscriptions.

Think about Netflix. Netflix could try to get you to pay a la carte for every movie, but what's better is predictability. What's better is them putting their whole catalog out there so you can access anything in the catalog for a set subscription rate. Locking in subscribers gives them predictability to be able to plan their business accordingly. In the same way, churches and nonprofits need to think about not just trying to maximize one-time gifts, but focusing on recurring giving, really focusing on the deeper principle of why someone would give on a recurring basis.

Nonprofits can learn from the tithe. If the church has been able to grow a membership that has the conviction to give 10% of their income every single month, year over year, nonprofits can understand what's possible.

Three Lessons Nonprofits Can Learn from the Tithe

• Conviction is possible. It's possible for a set of people to be so convicted and have such a revelation about giving that they will give up to 10% or even more toward a cause that they care about because they want to live a purpose-driven life.
• The best giving is out of gratitude. The tithe highlights a key understanding that those who are giving in the church: give from a place of gratitude. Cultivating a culture of gratitude within your giving community is vital. When most people give to nonprofits, they're giving based on guilt or in response to catastrophe. That's not always bad and can definitely be leveraged, but what's more powerful than guilt giving is gratitude-based giving. Not, “I'm giving because it's my responsibility; I have so much that I have to give some,” because when someone is guilt-giving they're giving out of their leftovers. When someone is giving out of gratitude, it's “I understand that I am blesssed beyond measure so out of that gratitude I will give out of an overflow.”
• Focus on the core. A lot of times, nonprofits can get so caught up in focusing on maximizing their reach that they can forget to focus on the core. But many times the biggest needle mover in your organization can be focusing on those who are currently giving just a tip, not a tithe. When you give them a deeper revelation about the organization, you can take them on a journey from being a <1% of their income giver to up to a 10% of their income giver.

Identify High-Capacity Potential Givers Who Are Not Yet Giving

If your goal is to grow your fundraising ability within your organization, are you examining the givers you already have to understand their current giving versus their giving capacity? Many organizations leave a lot on the table because they focus more on attracting new donors or volunteers than on growing and maximizing the ones they already have.

To even have a view of how well you know your community, you have to get your tools right and choose a customer relationship management platform (CRM) that can help you manage the activity of your donors.

Examples of CRM Platforms

• Salesforce
• Virtuous
• Planning Center Online (for churches)
• Bloomerang (for nonprofits)

You want to understand where there is high activity. Maybe you have people who are volunteering, maybe people who are giving on some level.

Next, you want to take that data and overlay it on some sort of wealth management tool. Overflow offers wealth management tool services in which we can analyze the potential net worth of a volunteer or an individual who has given something based on factors we can pull in from third-party resources and run through our algorithm. This can potentially be correlated to their capacity to give.

Not enough organizations focus on segments within their current supporting base, whether they're volunteers or people who have given before, and try to cultivate relationships and personalize value for those individuals to activate them at a higher level. This is key. One thing I see is that so many organizations go the spray-and-pray route, where they give one broadcast-level message to their whole community. With the right data, you can customize and personalize communications to specific segments in hopes to deepen relationship, deepen value, and speak to specific things that can give them deeper purpose to unlock bigger giving.

A lot of times your goal may be to grow your followership and your donor base, but sometimes the gold is already in your current list. You just haven't dug deep enough to be able to find the gold within your current supporter base. You haven't given them enough attention or personalization.

Here's the thing. You can add another 10,000 donors to your donor base and barely move the needle. Those new donors might give a few dollars one-time and never again.

You have to understand your systems and processes to be able to honor and steward the people who have already come to you. Focus on activating them at a deeper level before you ask for more. I like to use the analogy of a bucket. There's no sense in continuing to pour water in the bucket if you have too many holes, too many cracks, and too many leaks. It's going to stay a leaky bucket. For Silicon Valley B2B Software-as-a-Service startups, we are actually evaluated on our ability to retain and expand users or customers. 100% retention is actually not enough. What’s considered “good” is 120%. Why? Because a truly satisfied user or customer is not only retained but expand their relationship with the company by their willingness to pay more for additional features and services year over year. Instead of focusing too heavily on new donors if you have a “leaky bucket” you should disproportionately focus on solving the leaky bucket first so that you know that when new donors come they will stick and deepen their commitment over time.

Take Advantage of Corporate Matching Benefits

Let's talk about free money that organizations are not getting right now (see Figure 6.1).

Each year $4 to $7 billion goes unmatched! This means not enough people are taking advantage of their corporate match benefit and the “free money” is gone because it is a use-it-or-lose-it model annually.

There are so many Fortune 500 companies and beyond that have what's called corporate gift matching benefit. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple will match up to $10,000 of donations based on what their employees donate. My company Overflow also has a corporate gift matching benefit! Many of these corporate organizations use a platform to manage their corporate giving, such as Benevity, to facilitate these matches.

For you to receive this money, your donors need to be able to partner with their HR team, understand the process, and know how to apply for it so that every dollar they give to your organization to a certain threshold is doubled.

You can take advantage of this corporate benefit—for a nonprofit organization, it's about educating your donors that they have this at their disposal, especially if they work for a Fortune 500, tech, or consumer product goods company. They're already giving to you; why not do two minutes of work to email HR, or fill out the form, or submit the paperwork to be able to gain approval and distribution of a corporate match? Somebody's $10,000 gift in one year could become $20,000 if they just did that work, but they won't know to do that work if they haven't heard from you about it.

This isn't a top-of-mind process for your donors. They may never have heard of it and might not know to look up if their company offers this. People are busy. You want to make this super easy for them. Going one step further, platforms like Overflow can help nonprofits automate this education and automate the process at time of transaction. That's another option to explore.

This could mean six to seven figures of additional free money if your organization develops a process.

Explain IRA Required Minimum Distributions

Let's discuss required minimum distributions (RMD for short). Many probably know the term IRA, an investment retirement account. I won't go too deep into it here, but there are multiple types of retirement accounts. One specific thing I want to highlight is the power of understanding, on a high level, how IRAs operate when someone retires and how to really connect and direct your older donors to have an impact and live a life of purpose and legacy toward the latter part of their journey.

What is so fascinating is that for decades, people contributed to their IRA as a way of minimizing taxes. So, there is this mentality of trying to minimize taxes as much as possible and defer them toward retirement. Now, some people get to their twilight years and find they've actually done quite well, so they don't necessarily need the full distributions of their IRA every year. But there is this provision called required minimum distribution (RMD), in which depending on the regulation, the IRA holder still needs to withdraw a certain amount. If they don't, they actually lose that money.

The reason some people won't take a certain amount of distribution is that if they don't need it, they don't want to get taxed on it. After all, as I said, they have a tax minimization mentality. What they could do, though, instead of withdrawing it and facing the taxes or losing it, is to take the portion they don't need to use and directly donate it.

This is a win-win situation.

If they directly donate a portion of that RMD to a charity or nonprofit—hopefully your organization if you're the ones to educate them about this—they can take a charitable tax deduction, which enables them to further minimize their taxes while also making an impact in using it for good.

This is another master-class tactic to maximize giving.

Take Advantage of Wills, Trusts, and Legacy Giving

Bequests are a distribution from the portion of someone's estate that has been dedicated to charity or charitable purposes for a specific organization. Literally billions of dollars every year is given through bequests towards organizations when people pass away.

The opportunity for your organization is massive. There is still 43.9% of nonprofits that don't focus any fundraising/gift nurturing on gifts in wills or estate gifts. And yet … more than 85% of all planned gifts are made via a will or a trust, meaning charitable bequests (per Bloomerang, a top nonprofit CRM provider).

Per Charity Navigator, annual bequest giving represents over $35 billion! That is 5%–10% of total giving in any given year.

Now, millennials aren't thinking as much about the end of their lives. But what's interesting is that more and more we're seeing tools like Overflow that enable people to create a free will. Through the creation of a free will, someone can directly determine what percentage of their estate they want to donate at the end of their life and to which organization.

Hopefully your organization is signed up through a platform like Overflow, so that you can be highlighted at that point of decision.

Wills and trusts are powerful, and it's crucial for you to understand their power. At the end of the day, especially for those who have come into means and are on a trajectory to have an estate, they're in a mindset of not just the here and now but future generations and legacy. They don't necessarily need to, or even want to, pass on all of their wealth to one person or family, even if it's their children. They want their legacy to be beyond family and go toward a larger cause, something they really care about. Whether it's climate change, a faith-based community, a humanitarian effort—this is why people put their names on buildings at universities: they want their legacy to live on. They want their life's work to mean something beyond a nice lifestyle for themselves. They're asking how their contributions will serve and unlock others.

When you talk about legacy giving, nothing is as tied to legacy as your will and your trust. Understand that it can be simply a conversation to ensure your organization is positioned as a beneficiary of a donor's will or trust.

Accomplishing that goal takes incredible nuance, intelligence, and the right context. In a lot of ways, we try to scale this through technology at Overflow. We try to serve generations such as millennials, who maybe don't want to hire a lawyer to build a will, by offering them a service to make a free will. As they're making that will, gaining a value add from our service, at the very end we can simply prompt them to include a commitment for an organization they love.

If this free will service is a button on an organization's website and someone gets this free service through that organization's website, that organization will be top of mind for that person during their will-creation process. So when that prompt comes up, their mindset is “Thank you [Nonprofit Organization] for providing me this service so that I can easily create my will … sure I’d love to dedicate X% of my estate towards you as a legacy!”

That is a huge way to maximize giving.

Obviously, these are not finances that your organization will receive tomorrow, especially if a millennial is creating a will. You might not see these funds for 30 to 50 years. But think about your organization outlasting even your involvement in it. Your organization is important. Churches, charities, cause-based organizations—we hope these organizations live on and thrive for hundreds of years. Harvard and other universities thought about this decades ago. They created endowments and legacy gift programs and positioned themselves to be beneficiaries of estates, so now they're set up for hundreds of years. You have the opportunity to help your organization do the same.

Create a Line of Sponsorship Revenue at Events

This last master-level tactic to maximize giving is one that people don't really think about. Do you have a conference? Should your organization create a conference or some sort of event or gathering? Whether it's a conference focused on women, a conference for your organization, a conference focused on a specific set of people or industries within your supporter base, is there a subject matter expertise or something marketable within your supporter base that people would get value from?

If you're going to hold a conference, whether it's a large event with more than a thousand people or a smaller event with a niche, important group such as decision-makers or high-caliber people of a certain industry, you have an opportunity to drive additional cash flow through sponsorship. With research, your organization can curate a set of relationships with companies who want to sponsor your event to have a chance to reach your invitees.

Sponsorship revenue is sometimes underestimated. Sometimes the right sponsors can unlock incredible amounts of resources. Companies are hungry for opportunities to deploy capital that will yield them and ROI on marketing spend. If they can get in front of a set of potential buyers/customers/users, that is a golden opportunity for them.

This doesn't just mean product-based companies. Consider those, but also real estate companies or financial advisors who are always looking for clients. Companies have significant marketing budgets, and they're finding that deploying money on platforms such as social media or Google ads are starting to provide diminishing returns. They're not seeing ROI on online tactics that used to work. Instead, they are seeing ROI in places that are highly relational, where there's deep connections that can be made. The conversion rates are higher in the context of community.

What better way to have contextual-based marketing than at a conference that's tied to a church or a nonprofit or a cause-based organization that the community trusts? The key will be to curate these sponsors and to vet them to ensure their quality so you do not risk damaging the trust you have instilled in your community over years of serving them.

It's not uncommon for companies to have philanthropic budgets, and there's also a double bottom line here. Not only is sponsoring your event a marketing opportunity for them but there's also a feel-good factor—an opportunity to align their company with a deeper purpose that they really care about. That can also unlock larger sponsorships.

If you already have an event, this is a no-brainer. If you don't, seriously consider whether your organization should have an event or conference, with this being another line of resources, giving, and finances for your organization.

Now that you understand the power of alternative sources of and how to maximize giving covered in Chapters 3–6, you are ready to go beyond these strategies to the relationship aspect of fundraising. In Chapter 7, we will explore the donor experience and how the various ways your organization shows up for your community can affect and influence your ability to fundraise at the optimal levels.